Acting up is one of the few times your CV has to describe a job you did without officially holding it. Maybe you ran the department for seven months while the head was on leave, or your employer lent you to a partner organisation for a year. The work is real, the title is borrowed, and a reader needs to understand both in the time it takes to scan one entry.
Keep the word "Acting" and give it its own line
The temptation is to drop the qualifier. "Head of Finance" reads better than "Acting Head of Finance", and nobody, you tell yourself, will check. Someone usually does. A reference request or a background check returns your substantive title, and a CV that claimed the bigger one now looks inflated, even though you did the work.
Our piece on showing a promotion at the same company makes the point in one paragraph: label the acting role honestly. Here is what that looks like at line level. Put the acting role on a separate line under your substantive role, with its own dates:
- Finance Manager, Northfield Housing Trust, 2019 to present
- Acting Head of Finance, March 2023 to November 2023 (vacancy cover)
A few details make this layout work.
- The word "Acting" (or "Interim") comes first, so the qualifier is the first thing read, not a footnote.
- The acting line carries its own month-and-year dates. They sit inside the substantive dates, which shows the timeline without any explanation.
- A short reason in brackets helps when it is neutral: vacancy cover, parental leave cover, a restructure. Skip it if the story is messy.
- The acting role never gets its own employer heading. Same employer, same contract, one block.
If the step up was three weeks of holiday cover, it does not need a line. A single bullet under your main role ("Covered the Head of Finance role for three weeks during year-end") is proportionate. One distinction before going further: interim management as a career, where an outside professional is hired on a fixed mandate, is a different thing with its own CV format. This post is about the temporary step up inside your own employer.
The bullet that proves you did the bigger job
The acting line earns its place only if the bullets beneath it describe work your substantive role did not include. A recruiter reads "Acting" and wonders whether you held the fort or actually ran the place. Answer that with decisions, not duties.
Weak: "Responsible for the finance function during the vacancy."
Stronger:
- Signed off the annual budget for a team of 14 and presented it to the board (figures illustrative)
- Approved two hires and reorganised the payables team to clear a long-running backlog
- Acted as the named contact for the external auditors through the year-end audit
Each of those is something the Head of Finance does and the Finance Manager does not. That contrast is the whole point. Keep it to two to four bullets, because the acting role sits inside a bigger block and should not swallow it. If people management is the real story, our guide to management experience on a CV covers direct reports and budget detail, so I will leave that there.
Write these bullets in the same tense and voice as the rest of the CV. Acting roles often get written defensively ("Stepped in to support the department..."), which undersells them. You did not support the role. You did it.
Secondments: name the host, keep the home employer
A secondment is a loan. Your contract stays with your home employer while you work for another team, site or organisation for a set period. The CV should mirror that arrangement: the host appears under the home employer, not as a new job.
- Policy Officer, Eastbrook County Council, 2018 to present
- Secondment: Programme Lead, Regional Transport Partnership, January 2022 to December 2022
Name the host clearly. "Secondment to another department" hides the most interesting fact on the page. If the host is a government department, a regulator, a charity or a client, say which, in words a stranger would recognise. Loans between public bodies often run under local scheme names; keep those for application forms that ask.
Internal secondments follow the same pattern. "Secondment to the Leeds distribution centre, operations improvement, six months" is enough for the heading line.
Two cases bend the rule. If the secondment ran for several years and you effectively became part of the host, give it a fuller set of bullets, but keep the home employer as the heading. And if you were seconded into a role that was also a step up, say both: "Secondment and acting promotion: Programme Lead". A secondment is not a second job either; holding two jobs in parallel needs its own layout.
When it ended, and when it stuck
Not every acting role becomes permanent. The post gets advertised and someone else is appointed, or the original holder comes back from leave. People then delete the acting line or bury an apology inside it. Neither is necessary.
Add a neutral outcome line at the end of the acting entry:
- Returned to substantive role as Finance Manager, December 2023
That is all it needs. "Returned to substantive role" is standard wording in many organisations, and it reads as a fact rather than a failure. Do not write that you were unsuccessful at interview for the permanent post. If an interviewer asks, one calm sentence covers it: "The post went to an external candidate with a qualification I was still completing, and I went back to my own role." Then talk about what running the team taught you.
When the acting role did become permanent, merge the two. You do not need separate lines for the same job. Write the permanent title with the start date of the acting period, and use one bullet for the history: "Appointed permanently in September 2023 after six months in the role on an acting basis." From there it is an ordinary promotion entry, and the usual layout for a promotion at the same employer applies.
Summary, references and the paper trail
The step up deserves a clause in your summary when it matters for the jobs you are targeting. Something like: "Finance manager with eight months as acting head of finance, including a full budget cycle." Keep the qualifier there too. A summary that says "finance leader" next to a work history that says "Acting" invites the reader to wonder which one is true.
Pick references who saw the step up. Your usual line manager may only know your everyday work, while the director you reported to during the acting period knows whether you handled the bigger job. For a secondment, a manager at the host organisation is often the most useful voice, because they had no reason to be generous to a borrowed colleague. Ask first, and tell them which title and dates you used.
Then check consistency across everything a recruiter might hold. Application forms usually ask for job title and dates in fixed fields. Put the substantive title there and use the duties or additional-information box for the acting period or the secondment. Your LinkedIn profile should match the CV word for word on titles, because a profile that drops the qualifier makes one of the two look exaggerated. If you build your CV from LinkedIn with a tool like Postulit, add the acting role and the secondment to the profile first, with the same wording, so both documents agree from the start.
What to do before the next application
Open your CV and find every period where you did a job above or outside your contract. For each one, write a line under the home role that starts with "Acting" or "Secondment", carries its own dates and names the host. Under it, put two to four bullets that only the bigger job could have produced. If it ended, close with "Returned to substantive role" and the month. If it stuck, fold it into the promotion entry with one sentence. Then make sure LinkedIn, the application form and the person giving your reference all describe the same title for the same months.